The Barnum Museum: Stories (American Literature Series)

by Steven Millhauser

  For I was anxious, I won’t deny it. Slowly, night after night, I had brought my creature into being, and in the consuming passion of my task I hadn’t given much thought to exactly what was to become of her. The artist sells his painting, or leans the unsold canvas solidly against the unyielding wall. The writer multiplies his creatures in editions of many thousands, or perhaps places his heavy typescript, bound in black, in the bottom drawer of his desk where in its slowly spun cocoon of dust it grows secret rainbow wings as it prepares to burst forth into the light of posterity’s dazzling day. But what of those who summon into existence a being of the third realm? Aye, what of us? Do you think it’s easy for us, we solitary ones, we attic dwellers and noontime dreamers, with the mark of midnight on our brow? In the nights that followed it seemed to me that Olivia looked at me with a questioning gaze. Of course she didn’t just stand there always. I liked to send her off on little journeys into the midnight streets of my town, where she could walk unnoticed and undisturbed. But it was precisely these early wanderings that impressed on me a certain aimlessness in her way of life, and led me to construct for her a wondrous dwelling.

  I chose the stretch of woodland at the north end of town beyond the park and the new shopping center. There, drawing on my architectural studies of a year ago, I built a many-roomed mansion in the full mad flower of late-nineteenth-century eclecticism, complete with towers and cross gables, Gothic windows with heavy drip-moldings, Italianate scrolled brackets under the projecting eaves. I laid the grounds with an overgrown English garden containing meandering paths, dim pools, and moldering statues. The images came with surprising swiftness, as if I had already created them and were now simply permitting them to realize their nature. The extravagance of it all struck me as peculiarly suitable for Olivia. For wasn’t it expressive of a secret extravagance in her nature that I had suspected from the beginning, despite her air of detachment? In any case Olivia now had a home to go to when she wasn’t with me or wandering alone through the streets of the town. She lived there with her handsome but solitary father who designed intricate electronic equipment and had a passion for chess problems, classic military battles, and cryptic crossword puzzles, and her rather dim mother who played the piano and was rumored to rise at noon. There was also a sickly grandmother with uncombed white hair who visited for months at a time and rarely left her room. They had a housekeeper, a Mrs. Nelson, who came every Thursday. In addition to her bedroom on the second floor, Olivia had a tower room all to herself, where she liked to read. No one paid much attention to Olivia, who came and went as she pleased, took occasional part-time jobs that she always quit within two weeks, read long Russian novels while drinking tea with honey, and appeared to be waiting for something.

  At this period I was leading an extremely solitary life. I stayed up all night, went to bed at six or seven in the morning, and slept until three in the afternoon. I avoided my parents as much as possible and began eating dinner alone in the kitchen long after they were through. These strategies, developed at first to enable me to proceed undisturbed with my various projects, now permitted me to spend a great deal of time with Olivia. She was particularly vivid to me after eleven o’clock, when my parents went to bed and the whole summer night lay open before us. I would imagine her opening the front screen door and the front wooden door, making her way through the moonlit living room past the mahogany bookcase, past the round mahogany table with the old chain-pull lamp…Or I would creep down the attic stairs and down the carpeted stairs and through the moonlit living room into the warm dark-blue summer night. Olivia would be waiting for me. I would see her sitting in the front yard against a fencepost that divided her face into moonlight and shadow, or perhaps waiting around a corner under a sugar maple. And we would set off on a long, detailed, scrupulously imagined walk.

  All streets pleased us: the ranch house neighborhood with its rows of identical basketball posts that cast long precise shadows ending in parallelograms, the rural lanes shaded by tall sycamores and Norway maples, the small center of town with its red and yellow window displays: a basket of cheeses wrapped in bright green cellophane, a luminous arrangement of volley-balls and gleaming tennis rackets and exercise bikes, a watch rising and falling in a glass of water, a mannequin with tight black curls, yellow bikini, and silver sunglasses. Olivia studied these displays avidly. She liked to seek out some incongruous detail, like the white plastic spoon resting on the shiny black seat of an exercise bike. She always waited till the last moment before ducking into doorways at the approach of car lights, a habit that made me uneasy; my uneasiness made her impatient. I was calmer on dark rural roads in the north part of town, where crickets shrilled in the long spaces of dark between the light-pools of solitary streetlights. It was understood between us that I was in love with Olivia and that she did not love anyone.

  One hot evening as I lay on my bed in the dark and awaited the adventures of the night, I heard a faintly creaking footstep on the attic stairs. I sat up instantly. It was much too early for Olivia, who at that very moment was brushing her hair on the other side of town with a tortoiseshell hairbrush that had recently sprung into existence. The hairbrush bothered me. I didn’t like things springing into existence, but there it was and I couldn’t get rid of it. Another footstep sounded. It was unheard of for my mother or father to intrude on my privacy. After a pause there was another footstep higher up, and in this intermittent and ghostly manner the footsteps ascended, sometimes creaking and sometimes failing to creak, as if the climber were fading in and out of existence. As I imagined the foot rising to the topmost stair in preparation for entering the cold part of the attic, there was a startling knock on the door. “Come in!” I half shouted. The door stuck in the jamb, hesitated, and flew open.

  Framed by attic light, my shadowy father loomed in the doorway. He was smoking his curved pipe and wearing his robe and slippers. The room was dark except for the light coming from the open door, and as my father hesitated I said, “I wasn’t asleep, just resting. You can turn on the—”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said dryly, shuffling forward in the half-dark and stepping over books standing in knee-high piles on the ragged rug. A pile of books toppled softly but my father kept coming.

  “I see you’re working,” he remarked. “No, don’t get up, I’ll be only a minute. There?” He pointed with his pipe at the shadowy armchair wedged into a corner near the head of the bed. He sat down heavily, removed his pipe, and looked down at the bowl. I could hear him breathing heavily from his climb. “I’m afraid what I have to say is drearily predictable.” He thrust the pipe into his mouth and sucked rapidly, covering and uncovering the bowl with two fingers. “Terrible draw. You wouldn’t happen to have a pipe cleaner. Never mind.” He removed the pipe from his mouth, brought it close to his eye, and lowered it to his knee. “Trite scene, the elderly father admonishing his wayward son. However. I want you to come to a definite decision about your future. I have no objection to supporting your”—here he made a fluttering motion with one hand—“curious way of life, but I cannot do so indefinitely. I understand of course that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy. I certainly hope so. But it isn’t so much my philosophy I’m thinking of as my bankbook. You don’t happen to have a match. Deuce take it. Never mind. Your mother and I are in agreement, a remarkable fact in itself and one worth pondering. Sooner or later you’re going to have to make your own way in the world and I suggest you give the matter some serious thought. Fortunately for you, my pipe has gone out. Bear in mind that this interview is as disagreeable to me as it is to you. It is, however, over. Oof, these old bones. No no, please. Sit still. I prefer to be thought of as a ghost. Well then, Rob. Have a profitable evening, or should I say morning. Life is—well, yes: life. Night.”

  Slowly he shuffled from the room, stepping with exaggerated care over bookpiles and strewn underwear. In the light of the doorway he looked massive and wild. A thick ruff of iron-gray ha
ir circled his skull. I listened to his footsteps creaking intermittently down the attic stairs.

  Now this was a triply unwelcome intrusion. In the first place, I had been looking forward eagerly to my night of roaming with Olivia, and my attention was now scattered. In the second place, I had carefully put aside the tedious consideration of my ludicrous future. And in the third place, I hadn’t been paying much attention to my aging father, whose sudden appearance struck me with all the force of a haunting. He had been more or less reasonable with me, in his ironic way—a brilliant maneuver, for it had undermined my capacity to feel indignation.

  That night Olivia was waiting for me in one of the Scotch pines in the side yard. She climbed down, shaking the branches, and brushed the needles from her blouse and skirt. Olivia was like that: despite her quietness, her air of remoteness, she had bursts of mischievous gaiety. “This is for you, Robert,” she said, and handed me a pinecone. I was unused to her voice, which struck me as a little ghostly. “And this is for me.” She thrust a pinecone in her hair. “Tonight I’d like to go to—oh, Paris. Why don’t we go to Paris? That way.” She pointed down the road. Her playful mood unnerved me, and fevered me too, for she had more dash and daring than I; that night we wandered farther than ever before, beyond the parkway at the north end of town, and returned only when the streetlamps grew pale against the graying of the sky.

  Am I understood? Am I? To be with Olivia was for me a serene exhilaration, a fierce peacefulness. Our intimacy was that which only a creator and creature can know. Unable to imagine my life without her, I began to wait for her each night with a harsh, a hectic impatience that only her appearance could soothe away.

  Sometimes an uneasiness came over me. Lying on my bed with one arm bent behind my neck, I would stare at my dark piles of books, my desolate desk, my disastrous life. Then when I pushed aside the blinds, the lustrous moon in the dark blue summer night would turn to cigarette ash, the velvety night sky would be the color of bruises and decay, my trafficking in forbidden creations would be a knifeblade twisting in my temple: and as if nourished by hopelessness, invigorated by despair, all the more fervently Olivia and I would hurl ourselves into the pathways of the unchanging summer night. Have I discussed my headaches?

  By headache I do not mean the sharp pain at the side or back of the head, or perhaps behind an eye, the banal consequence of conventional stress. No, I have in mind the headache that is a band of metal tightening around the bones of the skull. I have in mind the inner blossom of fire, leaving behind charred and smoking places. And let us not forget the ratlike nibbling headache that gnaws its way slowly through the soft white sweet matter of the brain until it presses its furred back against the inside of the cranium, nor the fabulous winged headache with brilliant red and green feathers and gold-black claws that clutch and squeeze while the heavy wings beat faster and faster, nor the many-branched headache, the thornbush headache that swells and swells to fill the entire skull, pushing its glistening thorns against the soft backs of the eyes until the branches burst through the bloody eye sockets—such are the headaches that must be distinguished from those others, for these are creation’s dark sisters, shadows of the brilliant dream. Shall we continue?

  One night Olivia was lingering in town before a display of soup cans in a variety-store window that glowed now red, now green, now red, now green, to the rhythm of a desperately bored stoplight. My headache glowed now red, now green, and as I urged her to come away, please come away, away from all this, I was startled to see a figure emerge from a nearby doorway and approach us. This had never happened before and I felt a constriction in my chest as if some vital organ were being squeezed by a malign hand. Olivia turned without surprise. She introduced us. I disliked him immediately, but really, dislike is too gentle a term for that inner quivering, that intimate raw red tickle of revulsion as if all one’s nerve endings were trembling in the stream of an unwholesome effluence. This Orville—Orville!—came smiling up to us. I saw at once that it was a mocking smile. The very set of his slouched shoulders was insolent. “What a pleasant surprise,” he said, with deliberate falseness. He was tall and thin and paper-pale, and would have been gaunt were it not for a disturbing fleshiness about him: plumpish soft hands, a softness about his chin, even a little potbelly that pressed through his shirt. He wore faded bluejeans and old running shoes and a soiled white dress-shirt. He reminded me of a soft white tuber growing secretly in moist soil. “Olivia has told me so much about you,” he continued. “Actually she’s never mentioned you. What did you say your name was? Harold?”

  “We were just going,” I remarked.

  “Then I’ll join you,” he said and walked alongside Olivia, standing too close to her. “Ah, the night! What would we do without it? It’s a wonderful invention. Youth, clair de lune, dreamlike distortion, spiritual transfiguration—even death. They start you off with ‘Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star’ and before you know it you’re crooning ‘O sink hernieder, Nacht der Liebe!’ Match?” He reached into his shirt pocket and drew out half a cigarette.

  He was, Olivia informed me when he had left (abruptly, with mocking bow), the son of a friend of a friend of her mother’s. He had driven his mother and her friend to Olivia’s mother’s house one night, in order to have use of the family car, and on his return he had seen Olivia on the stairs. “Nice painting,” he had remarked, jerking his thumb at her. “Is it an original?” Since then he had shown up a few times, asking for Olivia; she had spoken to him once, indifferently. This brief, unsatisfactory history, the episode of our meeting, his disagreeable name, in fact everything about him filled me with irritable unease. My instinctive, brutal revulsion wasn’t simply a response to his physical person, his mockery, his air of knowing some unsavory secret he was itching to reveal, his whole spiritual bag of tricks, but to something else that I found difficult to define but that revealed itself more clearly on later occasions.

  Later occasions, did I say? Yes, later occasions—there were plenty of those. Night after night he would pop out at us from behind some maple trunk or lamppost and join us in our wanderings. Under the pressure of his presence the nights changed shape, became sadly deformed. Orville was by nature an intruder, a violator, and it showed in his slightest gestures: he leaped up to rip down handfuls of maple leaves, leaned over moonlit fences to break off flowers that he sniffed and tossed away. One night he pointed to the open door of an attached garage and began slinking along the driveway, beckoning. I was outraged but saw that Olivia wanted to follow. We crept into the dark garage and made our way along a narrow path between a station wagon on one side and on the other a pair of garbage cans, a basket of lawn tools, two bicycles, a hot-water heater wrapped in insulation. The black inner door opened to a moonlit porch. Orville sat on a chaise longue and smoked a cigarette, leaving the smoking butt in a bouquet of ceramic flowers. I saw that he was bent on goading me and in response I assumed an expression of intense boredom. Leaping suddenly to his feet he opened the porch door and beckoned us into the moonlit back yard. He led us under a taut badminton net, past a wicker armchair on which a badminton birdie lay on its side, and through a tall hedge into another back yard, where a yellow toy dump-truck sat beside a gardening glove, and then along a driveway bordered with zinnias until we came out on a leafy street.

  “Night’s dreamlike freedom,” Orville said, sweeping out an arm. “Existence as dream. Eh, Robert? Dare me to climb that roof over there and sit smoking on the chimney. Dare me to enter that window and bring back a bunch of grapes from the icebox. No? And yet, on such a night, when the moon resembles a beautiful head of cauliflower, one feels, ho hum, that anything might happen. Here, watch this. See that pole?” He lowered his head and began running hard toward a nearby telephone pole. “Stop!” Olivia cried, but he kept plunging forward. At the last moment I snapped my head away. When I turned I saw the moonlit telephone pole. Its long shadow stretched across a neatly trimmed lawn, stood up against the bright white side of a house, bent across t
he pale roof. Orville, with mocking smile, stepped out from behind the pole. He placed a hand on his stomach and bowed. I glanced at Olivia, who was looking down at her hands.

  Minor intrusions, you say, trivial violations; and yet they oppressed me. Those melodramatic entrances, those mocking innuendos, those little monologues on the dreamlike nature of existence—and once, removing half a cigarette from his pocket, he placed it on his thumbnail and said, “Here’s an interesting trick.” He flipped the cigarette into the blue darkness, shaded his eyes, and cupped an ear, listening intently. At last he turned up his palms with a look of exaggerated bewilderment. “Vanished,” he said. “Kaput. An illusion—like life itself, one is tempted to add.” Bitterly I resented his influence over Olivia. True, she treated him with indifference, even contempt, yet I noticed that she accepted his presence as if it were as natural as the night itself. He for his part had a subtly disturbing effect on her, for in his presence she seemed to me less vital, less richly particular, as if her full nature were being constricted by his mockery into a faded, wooden version of itself.

  As for me, I could not understand his poisonous presence each night. Whatever route I took, however hard I tried, sooner or later he would step out to greet us with a look of false surprise; and a nervousness came over me as I tried to account for him, tried to interpret his obscure hints.

  “Consider what a dreamlike existence I lead,” he said one night, stepping out suddenly from behind a hollyhock and joining us as we walked. “Today I rose at noon, breakfasted at one, at two considered how I might earn a living without the necessity of leaving my room, opened a novel at three, a moment later raised my eyes to discover that romantic night had fallen—and here I am, a shadow among shadows, gliding beneath the ridiculously round moon, which reminds me of a Necco wafer. The other day my mother asked me what I was going to do with my wife. She said wife, not life, but didn’t notice the slip because she was thinking about something else at the time and because I’m practically a figment of her imagination anyway. Those houses look like candy. And look at this! Someone seems to have been extremely careless.” Bending over abruptly, he began to roll up a leg of his narrow jeans. At the top of his running shoe began a white sock and at the top of the sock I saw or seemed to see nothing—emptiness—nothing at all. “Stop that!” I said angrily. Orville, grinning up at me, rolled down his pant leg. “A trick of all-transforming night,” he said, looking at me upside down. Olivia stood with averted eyes. I remember the blackness of her lashes against her brilliant white skin.